Thursday, 12 January 2017

Disabled: We have given up....

More evidence of the 'War on deaf and disabled' is succeeding to demoralise and deter people rightfully entitled to support, from applying for help.

As reported yesterday, deaf people are in the firing line particularly in being denied access to support, to welfare, to health, and to basic respect, but terminally ill people and bedridden blind disabled are also being turned down for help by the cruellest welfare approach since Queen Victoria turned them out on to the streets to beg.....

Mainstream attitudes have also hardened and changed with regards to equality, respect and access for deaf and disabled in the UK, via rabid right-wing media's consistently attacking the old, the sick and the vulnerable as 'a waste of time' and 'taking money from hard working people', and, labelling us all 'Frauds and liars..', demonizing an entire sector of the country. Deaf, old and disabled, are now the prime reason the UK is on the skids.... as the UK adopts the blame culture on those who need the most help.

To be struck down with illness or disability is difficult enough. To then have to fight tooth and nail for benefits to which one has a genuine right is soul-destroying.

It can be a long wait. Those who assume their unenviable condition will carve an unobstructed path to vital disability benefits are, it seems, oft left sidelined by a system skewed heavily in favour of those whose only affliction is a dismal predilection for penny-pinching.

Increasingly, it's being reported that people in Stoke-on-Trent are having Personal Independence Payments (PIP) rejected. And yet when these decisions are taken to tribunal, they are, say organisations representing the disabled, routinely overturned.

Not only does that suggest the system, overseen by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), is deeply flawed, but those who fall victim to it are forced to wait months without payment before their appeal is heard.

"When compared to the success rate of PIP appeals," says Disability Rights UK's welfare rights adviser Ken Butler, "the figures for rejected PIP mandatory reconsiderations are a disgrace. PIP has now been in operation for over three years, surely enough time for the DWP to have put in place an assessment process that gets most decisions right first time.

"Instead, many disabled people are having their right to a disability benefit withheld due to poor face to face assessments and further evidence then supplied effectively ignored in favour of Atos and Capita medical reports."